new report that reveals how U.S.-led airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Iraq have killed far more civilians than officials have acknowledged.
The Pentagon claims its air war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State has killed few civilians. But an on-the-ground investigation by The New York Times has revealed the U.S.-led military coalition is killing far more civilians in Iraq than it has acknowledged. The Pentagon claims just 89 of its airstrikes have killed civilians since 2014. But the Times found the actual rate of civilian deaths may be 31 times higher than the U.S. is admitting. In fact, the report reveals that as many as one in five coalition airstrikes on ISIS targets in Iraq resulted in civilian deaths.
The reporters write, “In terms of civilian deaths, this may be the least transparent war in recent American history.” The investigation comes as U.S. military officials continue to insist coalition bombing in Iraq has been precise in hitting its targets.
But The New York Times investigation reveals many of the American-led airstrikes against Islamic State militants actually killed civilians. One of the survivors they interviewed, Basim Razzo, described a coalition airstrike on his home in Mosul, Iraq, in 2015 in which his wife, daughter, brother, and nephew were killed. Video of the strike on his home shows a target hit with military precision.
Basim Razzo talking:
That night, as I said in my story, I went to bed around 1:00. I had just checked my daughter to see if she was asleep, and I lied down. And then I woke up to a devastating explosion. Did not realize what had happened. I felt that I was in a nightmare, but then I felt that something had happened, because I looked up to the skies and I could see the stars.
There was a terrible smell in the air. And then I started feeling my legs, pinching myself. I thought I was in a dream or in a nightmare, but no, it was reality. I looked to the left at my wife, and all I could see was debris. And I started shouting her name—“Mayada, Mayada.” She did not answer me. I started shouting at my daughter, Tuqa. No answer. And then I started shouting at my brother’s house, but I could not hear a sound.
Minutes later, I could hear a sound from far away, and it seems that it was the groundkeeper that we have. His house was about 500 meters from my house. Minutes later, he started shouting at me. He said “Uncle Basim, Uncle Basim, I am coming, I am coming. But I need to get a ladder so I can climb up. Are you OK?” I said to him—his name is [inaudible]. I said [inaudible] “Please, help me. I think I am very hurt and something is broken. I cannot move.”
I tried to stand up, but I fell down. I reached to my back because I felt my back was warm. And I touched my back, and then I felt something in my left arm. Something was warm. And it was blood. My back has been injured. My left foot had broken. My bed was in a v-shape, which resulted in a break to my hip. I tried to just move a little bit, but I could not move at all.
So minutes later, I could hear our groundkeeper climbing up to me. And then he came to me and he said “Are you OK? Are you OK?” I said, “I am badly hurt. What has happened to the other house?” That was my brother’s house. He said “I don’t know.” But I could hear a female sound. And then when I started shouting at her, it was my sister-in-law, Azza. And she said “Basim, everybody’s gone.”
But I could not see anything. It was very dark. The bombing has damaged the electricity. The street was dark. Everything was dark. And then about half an hour later, I could see somebody was walking, entering the farm with a torch light. And they climbed up the ladder and three members of ISIS were looking down at me. So the first thing I said to them, I said, “Are you happy?”They looked at me in disgust and they left me. They climbed down the ladder and they left.
But they had called an ambulance, but they did not let the ambulance come right away.
Because usually when there is a bombing, most of the time it is followed by a second bombing, so they wanted to stay out. So they left for another like 15 minutes. And then when they could hear that the planes were out of the sky, they ordered the ambulance to enter my farm.
And they took me down, put me on the ambulance, and they rushed me to the hospital. When I reached the hospital, it was chaos. I was disoriented. I didn’t know what was happening. I was in pain. And then I looked around and I could not know anybody. It was all ISIS members. But some person, he tapped on my shoulder and said, “Uncle Basim, don’t worry, I know you are here, my son.” He said, “I will be here for you. Don’t worry. Don’t worry.”
So he started rushing me—he cleaned my wound in my back. They did some x-rays for me. They did a CT scan for—they were afraid that I have like brain damage or hemorrhage. Thank God, I did not have anything. They put a cast on my left foot. And then I woke up the next morning around 10:00 with my brother-in-law and another friend, and they had told me what just happened. They told me that all my member family are gone.
In my house, it was me, my wife, and my daughter. Two lost their life—my wife and my daughter. In my brother’s house, which was about 20 feet away from my house, it was my brother, his wife, and his son. Only his wife survived. So total, four deaths, two survivals.
usually, before ISIS, I could come home late, like 10:00 or 11:00.
But since ISIS entered Mosul, it is better for me and more comfortable for me to be home early. I would sit with my family, sit with my brother’s family, after sundown. We will go out to the farm. So it was just a regular everyday. I would come home from work around 5:00 or 6:00. I’d have dinner with them.
We had a party, like a party for women. And my daughter and my wife attended that party. And then we just have tea. And then when it’s—and it is sundown, when the temperature cools down a little bit. Because you know, it was September. It is very hot in September in Iraq. So about 8:00 or 9:00, we would go out to the front yard. We would have tea, maybe some cold drinks. Maybe we will have some fruits. And then we would stay late until like 10:00 or 11:00. And that was my hours before my accident.
at that time, there was not that much bombing, before the liberation of Mosul. You would hear some bombing every now and then, but it was not that often. But you could hear drones in the sky. But for bombing, it was not that often.
daughter Tuqa. I don’t know if we had bought it earlier for her birthday, but it was left somewhere, and she had found it. And she lit it. And I was shouting at her because it was dangerous to light it inside. I told her, “Tuqa, honey, why don’t you go outside?” She said, “No, it’s not working. I think it is damaged because of the humidity, so it is not sparkling that much. So I will be safe. I’ll be safe.” So thank God she was safe. But she lost her life later.
Azmat Khan talking:
the coalition, which is led by the United States, releases monthly civilian casualty figures. Our analysis of them shows that they have admitted to 466 Iraqi civilian deaths in 89 airstrikes. This is of more than 14,000 that they have carried out in Iraq, which is an incident rate of 0.6 percent. Less than one percent. Less than one percent, exactly—0.6 percent. What we found is that one in five airstrikes, or 31 times as high, resulted in civilian death.
Many of these airstrikes took place near or around the time of liberation, but they were ongoing throughout. And so we saw an escalation around the time that Mosul or parts of Mosul were retaken. But you’re basically looking at our sample, which was in East Mosul. It was in a neighborhood called Aden, a town that’s—so and East Mosul is relatively an urban, densely packed neighborhood. Next, we had like a suburban municipality called Qayyarah. And after that, we had downtown Shura, which is probably a small settlement typical of many ISIS-held areas.
So I’ve been to the site of every single one. We interviewed hundreds of survivors. We excavated the rubble. We looked for any presence of ISIS, whether that was in ISIS propaganda materials, weaponry. We analyzed bomb fragments. We analyzed satellite imagery before and after in order to assess the date ranges of when these airstrikes had happened. We also checked all of the civilian casualty allegations with local administrators, health officials, or law enforcement.
Anand Gopal talking:
Most of these numbers come from internal reports by the U.S. military itself. For example, if they notice a mission irregularity, if let’s say a pilot is dropping a bomb and all of the sudden a civilian vehicle appears after the bomb is dropped, they will report that to their superiors, and often times, they will investigate that.
Occasionally, they get reports from outside sources, from the media, from Airwars, which is a great organization that tracks these things. But they tend, more often than not, to actually discount those reports, and it is their own internal reports they take the most seriously, which is why the number is so low—466 civilians killed in 14,000 airstrikes.
If that was true, it would make it the most precise air war in the history of humanity. But it’s because the threshold for what qualifies as evidence for being a civilian is extremely, extremely high. So in practice, people like Basim are in fact guilty until proven innocent.
And a large part of our investigation was to press that point. His family members were not counted. They were listed as ISIS, basically. After the airstrike on his house, the coalition put up a video of the strike claiming that it was an IED factory, car bomb factory, essentially. And so you could have gone on YouTube and found the video of the bombing that destroyed his family for over a year.
And it was only after we found this and sort of showed this to the coalition that they kind of took it off YouTube. And eventually, after a long process of hundreds of emails and back and forth, did they admit that they killed his family and that they were civilians, and they were eventually added to the count. Today they are part of the count, but they had not been for many years.
And in fact, talking about precision in some ways is a slight of hand, because—and in fact, it is true they are very precise. They hit exactly what they intend to hit. The question is, what do they think they’re hitting? And the intelligence is often so poor.
And again, it goes back to this issue of Iraqis having to prove that they are not ISIS, which is the opposite of what we would think. We would think that the coalition would do the work to find out whether somebody is a member of ISIS or not. Essentially, they assume people are ISIS until proven otherwise. And that’s what leads to this extremely high count.
Basim Razzo talking:
I was at Western Michigan. I graduated in 1988 in a degree with industrial engineering—B.Sc. that was in 1982 when she joined me. We went for like a honeymoon for about 40 days around the United States in my car.
interaction with the U.S. military. first, when I was in Turkey for my operation, I received a text on my Viber from the American Embassy in Baghdad saying that would like to contact me. I texted them back. I told them I was in Turkey and I will get in touch with them as soon as I am back in Baghdad. I returned late, about December. And then I texted them and then they gave me an appointment to meet with them in February. That is when I visited the American consulate in Baghdad.
And I have gathered some report. I wrote down the report. I gathered some pictures. Some aerial shots of my farm. And then I went to the embassy. I submitted the report to them. The woman who interviewed me, she told me that they would have to make sure that my allegations were right, and that they will pass my information to the DOD for verification. And then I never heard from them for like two months.
I emailed them back, and the lady said, “We still had not heard anything from them.” And nothing for months until about like five or six months later, I emailed them a letter, and it was returned, saying the mailbox is full. That is when I started doubting—that something is going on. And then that’s when I really met Azmat, and then things starting rolling from there.
When I submitted my report, she looked at it and then she went inside into a room and she came back like 15 minutes later. In my report, I had demanded that first and most important thing to me was for them to state clearly that this bombing is a mistake. This is just to clear my name, and so I can no longer be afraid to go back to Mosul. Because at that time, I was labeled as ISIS. My second demand was for them to compensate me for the losses of my family. I demanded compensation for my injury. I had lost my job because of my injury. So this was basically my demands in my report that I submitted.
it took them months and months to—if it wasn’t for Azmat’s pushing—and then they offered me—first they admitted that the bombing was done by mistake. But this took months and months of emails back and forth. They still have not provided me with a clear letter saying that the bombing was done by mistake.
And then they gave me an appointment to meet in Erbil, to offer me a payment they call [inaudible] payment. When I met with them at Erbil airport, this lady lawyer, she expressed her sorrow and deepest sympathy to my accident. She said, “We are sorry. We know the bombing was done by mistake.”
And I, for the second time and third time, I asked her, I said, “Listen, I need an explicit letter from you saying that the bombing was done by mistake.” She said, “OK, I promise I will get you this letter.” And then they offered me the payment of $15,000 as a compensation for the death of my wife and my daughter, which I immediately declined. And she said “I’m sorry, sir, this is the most that we can do [and we are tapped off?].”
And then I asked her for one more request. My farm has been ransacked by government officials. I cannot say who because there were so many government agencies that entered Mosul and liberated Mosul, being the Army, the federal units, the Hashd. I don’t know. But they entered my farm and they have ransacked it and have stolen so many things. And I said, “Listen, lady, I need you to help me get the word to whoever is in charge of that area that stop anybody from entering the premises.”
And she also promised she will get in touch through the American forces with the local commanders to stop anybody from entering. But this has not happened. Actually, until about three weeks ago, they have entered the premises again and they have stolen more material from storage that we have. So they have not offered me anything until now.
Azmat Khan talking:
That particular incident was an electrical substation in East Mosul, for which there was ample evidence of online. When I went on the ground and interviewed people, dozens of people, they said, “Just go online. You’ll find the videos.” And I did.
They showed children who were maimed and hurt. Some of their legs were blown off.
These young, young children, boys and girls—there is no doubt about whether or not they are civilians. And so this was readily available to the coalition, but in the coalition’s own assessment of this incident, they concluded there was insufficient evidence.
Now, to speak to this excellent point about how so many survivors that I have met really don’t have the resources or access or networks in the way that Basim did, to, for example, arrange an appointment at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, what I found repeatedly were people who couldn’t even afford to rebuild their homes. Some people who couldn’t afford to even seek necessary medical treatment.
One family in Mosul had three injured. They lost eight individuals in an airstrike last November in East Mosul. What they told me was that “we are still injured.” And the women took me to a room in the back and one woman revealed her headscarf and pulled open a cap and you could actually see the skull on her—you could see the skull visible from the top.
She had had no medical treatment. They needed really expensive surgeries. And ultimately what we did is we provided all of the coordinates of these airstrikes to both the coalition and to the U.S. Air Force after we had visited the base in Qatar, where many of these aircraft take off from. What they told us in the case of, for example, the incident I just described to you with these injured women who could not afford medical treatment, was in that case, they had conducted an airstrike just meters away on that day.
So this is very likely a coalition airstrike.
And these individuals, who often don’t even have cell phones that are working all of the time, have very little means and access. And we have now turned over all of those allegations that were close to where the coalition reported coordinates to us. And we are waiting to hear a response to them about whether or not they are even going to investigate them.
this is one of two condolence payment offers that have been offered in this entire anti-ISIS air war. So since August 2014, and some 27,000 airstrikes in both Iraq and Syria, this is one of two offers. This is the only offer that was made for a civilian death. The other offer that was made was for damage to a car in a separate airstrike, but not for a civilian.
every year, for the last two years, Congress has authorized $5 million dollars in funds to be used for payments like these. There have only been two offers made.
Basim is the only offer for a civilian death that has been made during that time. And in this case, the $15,000, just to give you a sense, it was his wife and daughter only—that is even higher than what they ordinarily offer, which is usually capped at $2,500 per death.
Anand Gopal talking:
I went with Basim to the meeting at the Erbil airport, and we didn’t exactly know how much they would offer, although we expected that it’s not going to be high. And in the meeting, the JAG officials explained that the offer they were going to make wasn’t an offer of compensation, but of condolence.
And it was an important difference, because the U.S. military is not in the business of compensating civilians who have lost things. Because of course, the problem is, from their perspective, if they feel that they start compensating people for what they have lost, then they’re going to start having to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars, and it would impede their very ability to wage a war. So instead, it is an offer of condolence, ultimately with the idea of not having Iraqis upset at them. That’s the purpose here.
Basim Razzo talking:
it is very upsetting because, actually, the first time I heard that the civilian life of an Iraqi killed was $2,500, which was really, really upsetting, I felt it was degrading. And I talked to one person—I said, “How would you feel, like if you are in an airplane accident in the United States, and you lost somebody you love, and the airline will give you $2,500 for it?” He said, “I would be outraged.” I said, “How do you think I feel? My wife, daughter, brother, and nephew were killed by an airstrike, and they were innocent civilians, and now they offered me $15,000 for two people.” I was outraged really by this amount. Very, very upset.
Anand Gopal talking:
The U.S. has effectively defeated ISIS, but at the cost of destroying whole cities and leaving thousands, if not tens of thousands, of families completely broken. Mosul is an example in which at least half of the city of Mosul is nearly in rubble. And these are not accidents in the sense that we would normally think about it.
These are policy decisions. For instance, in Mosul, the city of Mosul was surrounded and civilians and ISIS fighters were not allowed to leave the city in an exit corridor, which was one of the conditions which induced ISIS to take civilians hostage and led to extraordinary numbers of civilian casualties.
Azmat Khan talking:
Not just because we didn’t include West Mosul, but also because these airstrikes that we were serving—the 103 in that sample—occurred before a rule change that stated last December, under President Obama, that authorized more ground commanders, to be able to call in and approve airstrikes. And many believe that this was one of the reasons why we saw a spike in civilian casualties from these airstrikes.
But I also want to point out what we found to be a lack of ability to investigate properly by the coalition. What we found repeatedly during the course of our investigation is not just that they were not necessarily locating evidence or verifying evidence for allegations, but also that they sometimes lacked the information to even determine sometimes whether an airstrike was a coalition airstrike or their own.
In the 103 coordinates, and even more than that, that we passed on, we were told sometimes, “Listen, this particular airstrike was not us. It is unlikely to be us. The nearest airstrike we carried out was as far as 600 meters away.” But then we would find coalition videos uploaded by the coalition itself showing those airstrikes in the places that we had pinpointed, or in that area.
And when we followed up about it, we were told “We can only tell you what the log shows.” And we had this happen on several occasions. And what it shows you is that their logs are incomplete or what they’re searching is incomplete. And the number one reason that they cite when they deny a civilian casualty allegation is that they have no record of a coalition airstrike taking place in a geographic area. And that casts doubt on their credibility investigations so far.
They took down videos from YouTube. These videos still—and to distinguish, they still exist on other military websites, but YouTube was the one place where people could comment.
It really is troubling that these records were not kept in a way that was conducive to accurately investigating or investigating properly, because what we were told when I visited Qatar and I went to the Combined Air Operations Center, is that “We have 100 percent authority over where we drop our weapons. We know exactly where they are landing.” And that turned out in some cases not to be true.
Basim Razzo talking:
I want to add just one more thing in this one minute. Just like Azmat said, because there was no exit corridor for ISIS, they were forced to stay in the city and fight. And the excessive use of force, because some—probably one member of ISIS would be on top of a roof of a building—just remember, Azmat, the guy we met from [inaudible] family. There were two numbers of ISIS on his roof, and the whole house was bombed. This was excessive use of force.
My friends in Mosul told me of really precision bombing on small cars and only the car will be hit. But when you want to kill one person, you demolish a whole house? This is really terrible. I’m sorry for all the loss that has happened. I really would like the Americans to restudy their strategy of using this precision
____
Azmat Khan
investigative journalist and a Future of War fellow at New America and Arizona State University. She is the co-author of the New York Times investigation, “The Uncounted.”
Anand Gopal
journalist, assistant research professor at Arizona State University, and author of the book, “No Good Men Among the Living.” He is the co-author of the New York Times investigation, “The Uncounted.”
Basim Razzo
lost his family and his home in Mosul, Iraq during an airstrike in 2015 by the American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State.
— source democracynow.org 2017-11-22